Swati Srivastava is an associate professor of political science and a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University and a visiting scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. At Purdue University, she is the founding director of the International Politics and Responsible Technology (iPART) Lab. Srivastava is also the current Chairman of ISA-Northeast. Srivastava studies global governance extensively, including the political power and accountability of large technology companies. she is Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics (Cambridge University Press 2022) and articles in a wide range of top subject journals, including International Organizations, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and Political Views. Srivastava received her PhD in political science from Northwestern University, where she was associated with the Buffett School of Global Studies and the Center for Legal Studies. Her research has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the International Studies Association.
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates in your field?
I find that the most exciting research occurs in two areas. The first is a relational approach to IR, which extends how we conceptualize power politics, order, rules, norms (see this debate), identities, practices and ideas, for example in culture and finance. There are many other contributions worth mentioning, and many more by emerging scholars in the field, that enrich international relations as a whole.
The second area is how technology changes and is changed by global politics, in recent work that theorizes the blurring of state and corporate power, examining platforms such as Wikipedia or technologies such as blockchain , and identified new governance dilemmas. I also foresee that debates about artificial intelligence currently taking place in other fields will intensify and spread into the infrared realm in the coming years.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time?
I was labeled a constructivist before I knew what that meant. Alex Winter became a guiding light for my thinking at first. If I had not encountered his work, I would have left graduate school. As I progressed, Ian Hurd demonstrated how to read the text carefully and discover value succinctly. Other early inspirations are too numerous to list here, but I read widely in the social sciences and humanities, from state anthropologists to legal sociologists to classics of American political development and literary criticism.
I also began to outline my own way of thinking about international relations, inspired by Weber’s interpretive social science perspective (particularly Patrick Jackson, and generally ISA-Northeast). I know it’s important to make original theoretical contributions, but I also insist on original empirical contributions. For me, this means producing high-quality, systematic data on global politics, often on understudied cases. A research approach that I call “world-building.”
At your 2022 In the book, you write that international relations scholars generally do not define sovereignty, preferring to focus on its effects. What do you understand by hybrid sovereignty?
Sovereignty is a sponge concept because it represents many contested meanings. Some would prefer that we abandon its use entirely. I disagree. We cannot hope to abandon the role of sovereignty in structuring international politics. Instead, I view the argument about sovereignty as the interaction of two distinct modes. exist idealization sovereignty, according to the principle of indivisibility developed by early modern theorists, sovereign authority is fully represented as public in the “state.” exist enjoy sovereignty, achieving sovereign capabilities involves separable practices by state and non-state actors in a variety of public/private social relations. Unlike most standard treatments, I think we undermine the complexity of sovereignty if only one of the two modes prevails. Instead, sovereignty should be mixed Both Idealize and live immediately. We may idealize sovereignty as indivisible public sovereignty, but in reality sovereignty is divisible public/private.
Private or non-state influence on the politics of sovereignty often leads to questions about whether sovereignty is being ‘eroded’ or whether the state is ‘declining’. In hybrid sovereignty, public/private hybridity is both an integral part of and a challenge to sovereign authority. Viewing sovereignty as a hybrid enables international relations scholars to engage in more meaningful conversations about the future of sovereign governance.
You outline how hybrid sovereignty existed before the state system we know today. Are the dynamics between private and public actors that create this hybridity today significantly different from what has been the case throughout modern history?
While hybrid sovereignty is not new, the political stakes have historically been different. For example, in early modern Europe, when I studied how the British East India Company (EIC) became corporate sovereign, mixed sovereignty was tolerated for over 125 years until public deliberation made the EIC’s “sovereign awakening” unacceptable.
Today, we see similar forms of public-private hybridization as with the East India Company occurring through contracts, institutional links, or shadow relationships, but the political stakes of hybrid sovereignty have changed. One of the reasons is idealized sovereignty Less comfortable with overlapping and layered sovereign authority. Another reason is practice enjoy sovereignty It may become more visible due to widespread use or due to the publicity of advances in information and communications, and this increased visibility subsequently becomes politicized, as in the case of war contractors. But these are accidental contests in history. In another hundred years we might imagine different political interests so that contractors are no longer seen as a threat Idealized sovereignty.
Is it useful to think of the power of large private companies like Facebook or Google as embodied like governments, or that the power they have is embodied in a different way?
This is a question I’m asking in my current book project, so I can only offer preliminary thoughts. As I was writing the conclusion to my first book, I became interested in big tech. I thought, ‘Who is the East India Company today?’ Facebook was in the news due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Google was a prime target of the burgeoning literature. surveillance capitalism.
There are many similarities between Big Tech and the East India Company: global reach, resource extraction, North-South dynamics, reluctant governors, and democratic irresponsibility, to name a few. But there are also some unique features of the way big tech companies interact with countries and their users that we’ve never seen before. Tech companies’ governance powers don’t exactly mimic governments, either. I will develop an argument capturing the similarities and differences in my next book, so stay tuned!
At the time of writing this article, U.S. moves closer to banning TikTok over privacy, national security concerns, However, many young people on TikTok also see it as a useful platform for advocacy and mobilization. To what extent should attempts to regulate social media be seen as interference with the democratic right to free speech?
This year, I held a fellowship at Harvard University’s Restarting Social Media Institute, where I had the opportunity to learn about many of the debates surrounding social media regulation, including whether TikTok bans have merit. Clearly, many people view TikTok and other social media platforms as integral to free speech online. The ban is similar to Facebook’s approach more than a decade ago, when its services were shut down during the Arab Spring. At the time, liberal democracies saw government shutdowns of social media as a problem, but now they are pursuing such policies themselves.
In my research, I am interested in how big tech platforms present themselves to their users as standing up for human rights, including freedom of speech, against the government. At the same time, however, these platforms themselves also violate human rights, including freedom of speech through their content moderation systems. This balancing act is one of the differences I mentioned in my previous question about how Big Tech differs from the East India Company.
country likes India, USA, U.K, Many others are considering using artificial intelligence to help government decision-making. How might the use of artificial intelligence change the relationship between government authorities and their people?
In “algorithmic governance,” governments hand over all aspects of decision-making to artificial intelligence systems, sometimes requiring human supervision. There has been some resistance to this, such as in the Netherlands, where an artificial intelligence system used to determine child welfare payments was found to be discriminatory and, in many cases, resulted in children being deported. In response, the “explainable AI” movement believes that affected people should (1) have the right to know that AI is making (or helping to make) governance decisions, and (2) have the right to explain the reasoning behind algorithmic inferences. However, there are technical problems in achieving this goal, including not knowing what kind of explanation would be satisfactory for people who are denied housing or employment because of their interaction with an AI system. More generally, some believe that AI systems may be no more biased than humans, who are less likely to explain their reasoning.
I find the more interesting political question not just about bias and discrimination in AI, but about how algorithmic governance creates a new logic of authority that allows us to accept AI as more integrated into our daily lives. In this case, not only the use of AI by governments, but also the existence of algorithm-infused society, makes it difficult to analyze which harms are specific to AI and which are not.
Now, EU lawmakers are trying to regulate artificial intelligenceHowever They are also competing to fund European AI startups. This reflects a broader trend around the world to gain more control over technologies such as artificial intelligence.
If sovereignty is a sponge concept, then digital sovereignty may be even more of a sponge concept. These contrasting government efforts actually reflect hybrid sovereignty well. exist idealized sovereigntythe state attempts to exert sovereign control Exceed Artificial intelligence companies have adopted regulations such as the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, which bans certain uses of artificial intelligence and imposes additional obligations on high-risk artificial intelligence systems. In the United States, export controls and the CHIPS Act are also examples, as advances in artificial intelligence rely on high-performance computer chips. However, in enjoy sovereigntythe state’s ability to exercise sovereignty through Artificial intelligence companies, for example, form partnerships in data analysis or storage, and encourage hardware innovation by funding startups or relaxing regulations.
So when we ask about the feasibility of achieving “digital sovereignty,” the question assumes a clear meaning that does not exist for the term. idealized digital sovereignty This is evident in the “European Sovereign Cloud” project, but in Achieving digital sovereignty This vision can only be realized through the participation of American companies. A hybrid sovereignty approach makes sense of seemingly contradictory policy choices in the name of “digital sovereignty.” In short, we should expect to see states asserting control Exceed Artificial intelligence and control through AI.
What is the most important advice you can give to young scholars of international relations?
Read extensively beyond infrared specifications and produce raw data. The first will help you theorize, the second will help you construct the world. Both are important for advancing our field.
Further reading on electronic international relations
